


variation fifteen

by lapoesieestdanslarue



Category: Captain America (Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Time Travel, Implied/Referenced Suicide, M/M, Sad and Happy, Set during TFA, Time Loop
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-23
Updated: 2019-01-23
Packaged: 2019-10-15 05:15:45
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 9,104
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17522594
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lapoesieestdanslarue/pseuds/lapoesieestdanslarue
Summary: And there, in front of him--MuddyBleedingGasping--  “Bucky?”The name catapults him back to wherever this is now, far from lying dead on a battlefield.“Steve,” the other man replies, looking just as shaken and sounded equally confused.





	variation fifteen

**Author's Note:**

> Variation, def.;  
> "In music, variation is a formal technique where material is repeated in an altered form. The changes may involve melody, rhythm, harmony, counterpoint, timbre, orchestration or any combination of these."

Steve has this- this  _ itch,  _ right in the palm of his hand, ever since he can remember. It gets worse at night, when the dreams of dark ravines and cold ice come, and when he wakes there’s a cry caught in his mouth and his hand outstretched, searching for something that’s not there. 

 

* * *

 

There’s a boy, Steve sees, that gets blown to bits by a German bullet. It goes right through his heart and out the other side, pulling him like a ragdoll through the air, exploding through his body like it were nothing, showering red. He’s plucked from his horse like a feather on the wind, thrown on his back onto the ground. The sound is so loud it’s deafening- Steve can’t remember hearing anything, just seeing the white fog, feeling the debris hitting against him and the thump of the bullets against the ground ricocheting off his every fibre. 

More firing, and something clips Steve in his side. He’s jolted by the force of it, the searing pain, and the shock sends his horse into flight mode. She bucks and bolts and his skinny arms are no match against her strength; he’s yanked into the air within seconds, like a puppet on strings. 

Ahead the war rages on, getting louder and bloodier by the second, but all Steve can focus on is the hammering of his heartbeat in his ears, the splintering in his ribs every time he breathes, the boy beside him, the other one, looking at him like he’s seeing a ghost. Maybe he is. He’s tall, nearly as pale as Steve but it’s hard to tell with the sheer amount of dirt and grime covering him. Probably not much older than Steve himself. His shirt is drenched in sweat and now blood. And his eyes sing a song swan in pain, blue as the water below the ravine and twice as enticing. 

He lifts his hand off of gaping hole in his chest, reaching out across the dirt that separates them. His brow is creased is agony, but he’s asking, he wants--

With all the effort in the world, Steve pulls his dead-weight arm up and grasps the boys’. When their hands touch it’s like a shock to his entire system, like jumping into freezing cold water. The other boy moves forward, grunting with the effort and pain of it. Their heads are so close now their foreheads knock against one another. 

There’s so much more blood, spilling with every passing second, Steve’s almost black with it, reaching nearly up to his elbows. Beside him, the boy still gazes at him as he bleeds out. Steve looks down, sees the puddle of red he’s lying in, but whether it’s his blood or the other boy’s he doesn't know. He can’t tell which is which anymore.  

When he looks back up, and their eyes meet once more, the breath is taken from his lungs. Memories like lightning erupt in through lost crevices of his mind. 

“Bucky?” He stutters out to the staccato rhythm of his heart.

“I--”

A bullet through their chests takes the answer from him, silencing them. 

 

* * *

  
  


They call it the war to end all wars, apparently. 

It’s been dragging on for some time now, longer than Bucky ever thought, longer than anything ever before. Guns and bombs and more dead in a minute than could ever be conceived as natural-- nothing holy about it, no matter how much the Colonel likes to preach before the battlefront. 

His hands are shaky as he lifts the match to light the cigarette; and it should say something that they only time they seem to be still is when they’re holding a gun. He doesn’t even recognise them now, actually. The tips of his fingers are calloused and scarred over, dirt deeply embedded in his nails he’s no chance of ever getting it out, and knuckles permanently scraped and bloodied to bits from shrapnel and debis.

A rat scuttles by, too close for comfort and Bucky kicks at with the sole of his boot. 

War is mean. War has made him mean. They say monsters are created, not born. He thinks of this as he looks out at the barren front, a ravaged wasteland of blood and guts and somewhere, buried, glory. Thinks of the monsters that have been created, hardened with lies and false prophets, painted with the blood of victims. But, in honesty, something was born in him, that first battle, the tangible taste of the threat of his survival. Something that smirked and revealed his wickedness. 

There are two kinds of monsters, he supposes, those that are created, molded like clay from earth, and those that are born, hatred hidden in their veins.

“Barnes! Grub’s up.”

Bucky grunts, slinging his gun over his shoulder and nodding to the man who takes his watch. Trudging through the trenches, the mud soaks through his worn shoes, his feet raw and cold. The sun creeps out from behind the clouds just as he approaches the makeshift room dug into the side of the trenches-- Captain’s quarters, really, but as the war goes on and they lose more and more men by the second it's opened up to them; indulging them with simple luxuries like chairs to sit on and tables to eat. Like pigs being fattened up before the slaughter.

Pushing aside the flap of cloth that acts as a door, Bucky ducks his way inside, where Colonel Ambrose is on a rant about some wet-behind-the-ears new Captain.

“Fellas, this here is Captain Rogers. He’s just made it out of Aisne and saved a load of sorry POW asses along with it. I’ve assembled you here because he wants a task force, asked for the best and, here you are.” Ambrose glances at Bucky, clapping his hands together. “Barnes, this is Rogers. Steve Rogers.”

The blonde head turns around, stands up tall and puts out his hand for Bucky to shake. His eyes are bright, and piercingly blue. Sharp, like ice. Like they’re asking him something, but Bucky doesn’t know what.

“Nice to meet you.” He’s a boy from home, from Brooklyn. The drawl to his words is a comfort Bucky had long forgotten. 

“What the hell brings you here?” His own words are hard and mean, and he doesn’t know why. Maybe it’s the blow to his heart, going triple time now. The eyes, the voice it’s-- It’s too much. Everything about it is everything at once, and he can’t take it. Something about him is asking for remembrance, for consideration. It niggles at the back of Bucky’s mind, a distracting and annoying buzz. Asking, asking, asking, but in a language Bucky doesn’t know, or can’t understand.

“Steve is from the 108th, Barnes,” Ambrose explains. “He’s the only one that made it out of Aisne.”

“They offer you leave?”

“What?” Steve is standing, still, not having sat back down as he watches Bucky grab bread and butter and the jar of jam. 

“I said, did they offer you leave?” Bucky focuses on his bread, buttering it with a knife and not bothering to spread the jam, too jittery about tonight’s attack to care that much about food.

“Yes.”

“Shoulda’ taken it,” he says through a mouthful. 

“Fuck you.”

“Easy, fellas,” Ambrose warns. “Rogers, come with me and I’ll show you around the rest of the base. Barnes, you’re on watch at seventeen hundred, Rogers will join you.”

Bucky gives a half-assed salute and a “yessir”.

Rogers follows Ambrose out, and the minute they’ve stepped foot outside the tent, Duggan is pitching his empty pack of cigarettes at Bucky’s head.

“What the hell was that for?” He picks it up off the ground and crumples it up, throwing it back at the other man.

Duggan just chuckles. “You’re some asshole, you know that?”

Bucky smirks, ignoring the acidic churning of his stomach, the guilt knotting itself inside his chest.

 

                                                                                                                                ~*~

 

Steve trudges-- literally, through all the mud-- to his watchpost, passing another half-lucky soldier on his way, who likes to give Steve a funny look while he smokes a cigarette. 

It’s been four hours. All’s calm, quiet. Until Steve’s fingers start itching, like they do, and he starts rummaging around his coat pocket, eventually landing on his pack of cigarettes. He silently offers one to the Sergeant, and Barnes accepts. 

Usually, it’s quiet, sitting there in the dirt, cold and wet seeping through their boots and skin and burrowing in their bones. They don’t have much to say to each other, Steve reckons, what with Barnes being a prime shit. Their breaths come out in plumes of curling white simultaneously, their chests rising and falling in perfect harmony. 

“How are you surviving it?” Steve says, muffled slightly from the cigarette between his teeth. “I’m fucking wet, I’m fucking cold, soon enough I’m going to go fucking insane from how  _ quiet  _ it is. It’s the goddamn seventh circle of Hell.”

He doesn’t look up, too focused on the jack-shit lighter, until the silence has been going on so long. When he does, Barnes’ empty eyes are boring into him, dull and almost lifeless; save for the pain. “I’m not,” he answers. 

He reaches over, and flicks on the lighter. 

 

                                                                                                                   ~*~

 

It’s some kind of unhappy trick of fate that they end up on watch together, nearly every night, for six hours straight before some other unlucky sons of bitches take over for them. 

Bucky wishes he knew how long it had been but the minutes and days slip by him in a blur of casualties and losses and too many bullet shells to count. One night, after they’ve been relieved, Bucky tells him there’s coffee back in quarters, if he wants some.

“Not that I mind,” he drawls, feigned indifference. “More for me, ‘n all that.”

Rogers stops, and looks at him. For a minute, a claw wraps around Bucky’s throat and stones fill his belly, pure fear as he wonders if Rogers knows, if Rogers feels the same-- 

“Sure,” Rogers answers. Bucky feels simultaneously weak with relief and drenched with disappointment all at once. Bucky leads them back to the captain’s quarters, kicks out a chair for him, hands him a cup. Horrifically domestic.

It’s the first time they’ve ever really been alone together, and not on watch. It’s still quiet between them, but Bucky doesn’t want to push it; Rogers looks pale, paler than he was when he first came which is a hard record to beat, and exhausted. 

Bucky takes a sip of his coffee. Rogers looks at him. “You able to drink your coffee like that?”

“Like what?”

“Black as the night.”

Bucky rummages around the captain’s cupboards, until he finds his loot. Dumping two heaped spoonfuls in, he gives Rogers a shit eating grin. “And sweet as sin.”

 

                                                                                                                             ~*~

 

Late, one of the nights, when half the basecamp has been struck down with pneumonia and so they have to take double the watch shifts, Rogers speaks into the quiet they’d made a home in.

“Steve,” he says, suddenly.

“Huh?”

“You always call me Rogers. My name is Steve, though. Least, that’s what my friends call me. I’m Rogers to the Captain, or the Colonel. But we’re. Well, we’re what we are. We stay up late at night and watch out for Germans or the like and protect the camp and nearly get ourselves killed more times than I can count. You can call me Steve, if you wanted. ‘S all I’m sayin’.”

The pure, knocked-hard Brooklynite edges to his words is a comfort Bucky has long, long missed. “You can call me Bucky, then.”

“Bucky,” Steve says, as if he’s testing the feel, weight, taste of it on his tongue. It’s the first time he’s been referred to by his first name in a while. In a year, maybe two.

“You’re from Brooklyn, right?”

“Yeah, over by Bay Ridge.”

“Ah. I’m down in the Park.”

Steve lets out a low whistle. Bucky scoffs and digs him in the side.  

“Hey,” Bucky says suddenly, “Say ‘Long Island’.”

“Long Island,” Steve repeats.  _ Lawn Guy-land.  _

Bucky smiles a real, genuine smile for the first time in what feels like forever. “You’d miss it, wouldn’t you? Home.”

“Yeah,” Steve replies quietly. 

Their heads are rested against the mudbanks, and they tilt their faces heavenwards, looking into the face of the stars, as the first drops of winter snow fall down, like feathers from a wing.

 

                                                                                                                          ~*~

 

Steve’s lying in the bed next to Bucky’s, brow puckered in concentration. It’s just them in the bunk, just for the time being while Morita and Denier are on watch and the others work on the trench before the raid tonight.

Bucky nudges Steve with his foot. “What is it?”

“I swear, I could--” Steve stops himself, as if he’s afraid of what the words might mean if he were to speak them.

“What?”

Steve’s eyebrows are creased, and he looks distressed. “ _ Remember _ you.”

Bucky shifts in his bed, propping himself up on one arm. “From home?” He asks slowly, heart hammering in his chest. No, not from home. He knows it’s not from home. The answer to a question he’d been too afraid to find out himself.

Shaking his head slowly, Steve answers “No… Somewhere long, long ago, like another life, or--” He cuts himself off. Bucky’s never seen him like this; worrying his lip with his teeth and rubbing circles in the palm of his hand with his thumb. Scared. Afraid. “Something bad is going to happen tonight. I can feel it.”

“Steve, that’s normal--”

“No,” he screws his eyes shut. “It’s not just jitters. Buck, I’m telling you, I-I’ve been having dreams, okay? Something’s gonna happen tonight. I don’t know if I’m gonna survive it.”

The words cut Bucky to his core, taking the air from his longs. 

Dying. 

It’s a prospect they’re intimately versed with, facing it day in day out. For so long, he’d accepted it. The natural resolution to a job that demanded it of him. 

But the thought had slipped his mind, recently. And now--

 

Now he’s gripped with an immeasurable fear. He doesn’t  _ want  _ to die. He doesn’t want  _ Steve  _ to die. He doesn’t want to leave the small bit of camaraderie they’d built for themselves in a world that had already taken so much. 

But he’s still what he is; a coward. And so he reaches out across the divide and takes Steve’s hand. “It’ll be okay,” he soothes him, reassuring. Denying his own shared terror at the prospect, wells of unspoken emotion lying choked in his chest. He shushes Steve, assuages his fear. He promises not to let go, and to remember.

 

                                                                                                                                  ~*~ 

 

It’s over in a heartbeat. They run out, leading the frontlines, into the wasteland, the endless stretch of wartime and death. Steve takes the lead, Bucky has his six. Safe, he’d said to Steve. In fact, he’ll probably be bored, this information’s Ambrose has got is probably shoddy; they’ll get up there guns blazing and find nothing, nothing at all.

But there was. Vicious and bitter, their enemies descend on them, raining artillery and spilling blood. Bullets fly around them, barbed wire catches his foot. Bucky takes a breath, steadies his gun. In, out. One, two. Aims, fires, kills. 

Rinse, repeat.

Moving slowly through the field as if through molasses, time slowing and bending to some Godly will. Aiming, firing, killing.

He didn’t mean it, but he hadn’t seen it. It had been buried so deep in the earth he didn’t see any cause for worry. He sets his foot down, feels the dirt beneath him shift in a funny sort of way and then-- 

He realises too late. His eyes widen and he feels his face drop in shock, the horror of the realisation. Bucky reaches for him, and Steve has just enough time to rip his arm away and push Bucky back, but not enough to anything to save himself. 

He’s flung upwards by the force of it, knocking the life from him in one nimble blow, dust and blood filling his mouth and nose. There are shouts, screams, more firing, as he’s propelled onto his back and pushed into mud and guts and death. When he looks down, he can’t tell what’s left of him; completely disguised by blood and rubble, but when he goes to move himself he finds that he can’t. The feeling in his toes is gone, everything below the searing pain of his knee, gone. He stares, numbly, wondering what this means. Wondering if this is the end. 

“ _ Steve,”  _ he hears. Strangled, breathless, hoarse. “ _ Steve. _ ” He turns his head, and sees Bucky, face marred with dirt and grime, dragging himself with his arms across the ground.

“Buck,” he gasps. “Bucky, get back--” 

“Steve,” Bucky repeats, his voice broken with pain and grief. “Steve, I lied. I know you, too. I knew.”

“You knew.” His voice comes out unsteady as he looks at the bright blue of Bucky’s eyes. “You know me.”  His hands are shaking, and he’s gone freezing cold all of a sudden; the blood draining from his face and his heart beating frantically in his chest against the injuries that threaten to destroy him. He thinks for a second that it might be raining until Bucky reaches out his thumb to wipe the wetness away and Steve realises that he’s crying. 

“I know you, Steve. I do. I’m sorry.” He brings his hand down from Steve’s cheek, entwining both their hands. Bucky’s is red with blood, and Steve can’t be sure which one of them it belongs to. 

“ _ Bucky,” _ he sobs. 

“Remember me, okay?” Bucky asks, his own voice growing fainter. “Remember me for next time.”

“I will,” Steve vows. 

Bucky relaxes then, a tired sigh escaping from his lips. He rests his forehead atop Steve’s, while bullets hail down around them and boots fly past. 

The smell of his burning flesh, the blood in his mouth, and Bucky’s hand, in his, are the last things that linger as the world fades out, and he succumbs to the darkness.

 

* * *

Tattered and smoke-blackened banners fly from lone wooden poles- countenance cast in vivid red under those stains wrought of battle, surviving with all that stoic dignity of a final stand. Charred furniture stands as a makeshift barricade under layers of cinder and- catching the light- thick shards of broken glass and discarded bullets.

Back home, the women from his church are huddled together saying novenas and clutching rosaries until their fingers bleed and their mouths go dry. This war is like nothing that’s ever been seen before, they say, so vicious, so violent, so far from sanity. 

Standing here, though, on a base camp in Azzano a stone’s throw from enemy lines and having seen men tortured and maimed in the vague claim of a given right, Steve can’t help but feel that that’s a hollow lie sold to ordinary people to stop them from seeing the truth. That war is always the same. That war never changes. 

He follows Colonel Ambrose through the trenches, feeling the weight of fresh, tired eyes on his back. 

“Welcome.” It’s distinct over the din of military life, and it comes from a man, sitting on the ground with his back pressed against the wall of a trench, smoking a cigarette. He’s older than most of the men here, older than Steve, and though he knows intrinsically that he has never met this man before, there’s something about him-- his posture, the way he holds his cigarette, that rings a bell in the far corners of Steve’s mind. 

“Hello,” Steve replies. 

His palm begins to itch.

 

                                                                                                                                    ~*~

 

“Fellas, this here is Captain Rogers. He’s just made it out of Aisne and saved a load of sorry POW asses along with it. I’ve assembled you here because he wants a task force, asked for the best and--” Ambrose smiles, clapping his hands together. “Here you are.”

There’s a man, at the head of the table, blue eyes and swept brown hair that falls into his eyes, that abruptly stands up. There’s something about the motion, the sharp screech of the chair against the floor that takes--

       The air from Steve’s lungs, like a bullet from a gun 

                                                                A bullet with your name on it from your best guy’s 

                                                                gun. 

 

Hands cover his face, wrapping around his neck and skull and 

 

                                                                                Smothering, 

 

                                                                                                        Blocking the air from his 

                                                                                                        Nose

                                                                                                        Mouth

                                                                                                        Lungs

 

                           And the light from his 

                                                            Eyes

 

Until it lets up, a veil of smoke lifted, and he’s on the ground. Dust particles oppressively near, threatening still to descend and strip away his senses. 

 

And there, in front of him--

                                           Muddy

                                                        Bleeding

                                                                          Gasping

 

\--  “Bucky?” 

 

The name catapults him back to wherever this is now, far from lying dead on a battlefield. 

“Steve,” the soldier replies, looking just as shaken and sounded equally confused.

“You two know each other?” Ambrose asks. 

“I- No.” The words are clumsy, like innocent hands reloading a rifle. The fall from Steve’s mouth and onto the ground, met with an almost unbearable silence. “No, but I-- I think I passed you by, back home. Brooklyn, right?”

“Yeah, Park Slope,” Bucky answers, going along with it. Maybe he hadn’t seen what Steve had, maybe that really was how they knew of each other; Steve’s mother used to take him on walks that meandered by Park Slope on a good day. Maybe Steve has soldier’s shock, maybe he’s over-tired. 

“Well, you two boys can take watch tonight and get reacquainted.” Ambrose slaps Steve on the back and leaves the tent, leaving them alone. When Steve looks up, Bucky is staring at him like he’s an apparition, made real, and from the haunted look in Bucky’s eyes, Steve doesn’t think he’s in shock or tired at all. 

 

                                                                                                                           ~*~

 

It’s four o’clock in Brooklyn, and sunlight is dripping like honey from the window as the sky glows orange. 

Bucky is five years old, and he is lying on his stomach in his family’s apartment, looking up at his Grandma, who is telling him a story. In the kitchen, his mother is making a stew. His sisters are playing hopscotch down below. It is a feeling that never goes away.

“Heavy wings, my dear,” his Grandmother says, rocking to and fro in her chair by the window. “I had them. Your mother had them. You have them. How were we ever supposed to fly? Perhaps that is how we ended up in the river.”

Bucky doesn’t remember this story, and he says so, his voice coming out dreamy and far away. 

“What?” she asks. “You want to know how I ended up in the river? Why would that matter to this story?”

Please, he asks.

She begins to smoke a pipe, conjured from thin air. She hums and haws. Well, she reckons. Alright, then. “If you look long enough into the surface of a river, any river, you’ll see my face pop out of the waves. I rise, for those patient enough to wait. And my mother, and her mother before her, and before her. We sink heavily when your gaze upon us loses its power. We rise, we sink. We rise and sink. Sink. Rise. The water might seem cold to you, and dark. If you believe this to be the truth, then you do not know coldness, my boy. You certainly do not know darkness. What is truly cold does not flow. And what is truly dark has no name and remains unknown to you, until the light goes out of your eyes and you return to its vastness.”

Bucky wonders, will he end up in the river?

His Grandmother gets a sad look on her face. “I fear, my dear, you will. But you don’t worry. Someone who loves you will always be watching, waiting, reflecting you when you don’t even think there’s anything there at all. It is one thing to be in the river, but another thing to have a keeper.”

The light from the window is fading fast, and faster, and when he gets up from the ground he sees it. A wave, big and black and in some way beautiful coming closer and closer, and the room getting darker and darker, and his Grandmother reaching out and grabbing his hand and then-- 

 

                          Gasping,

 

Sitting up and being met with total darkness, staring into the face of the night. 

“You okay?”

A voice, from beside him. Steve’s. 

He swears that he knows him, from somewhere; tendrils of something half-remembered have coiled around his memories all day, but he’s nowhere closer than he'd been at the start. Whatever that they had once shared is lost from him.

“Bad dream?”

“Yeah, something like that.” He reaches over with shaking fingers the canteen by his reveling in the warmth. “You want some?”

“What is that?” Steve asks, words appearing as plumes of white breath in the coldness of the evening. 

Bucky busies his hands, digging into his pockets for stolen packets of sugar from headquarters. The still-warm aroma wafts from the flask, threatening to take him back to his family's apartment. He could almost feel his grandmother’s eyes on him, his mother’s arms around him, if he let himself. “Coffee.”

“How do you take your coffee?” Steve’s voice is hollow when he speaks, and when Bucky turns to answer he sees eyes that are pitch black pools, like they’ve been lost in time or something. It’s like Steve is staring at a ghost. Or into the river. 

“Black as night,” Bucky answers. 

“And sweet as sin,” Steve finishes. Bucky laughs, startled. The look has lifted, only slightly, from his face, and he accepts the proffered cup with a tight smile. 

“How’d you know?”

“Once I knew you.” 

 

                              (And your eyes in the light, and your hand on my back, he thinks, but 

                              doesn’t say.)

 

He says it so simply, like it’s not some kind of earth-shattering revelation, like it hasn’t just bent Bucky’s entire understanding of time and space. Like it hasn’t just confirmed the existence of the something that was niggling in the back of his mind, the insistence that there was more to the man before him than his homegrown roots. 

“I know it sounds crazy,” Steve continues, his voice gone softer at the look of shock on Bucky’s face. “I do. But I swear, I’ve known you. And not just from back home, either. In fact, I don’t ever remember seeing you until today. But it’s like it’s a dream, or a memory, or--”

“Something you’ve buried,” Bucky says, the words not his, but seamlessly falling from his mouth, making real the indescribable mass he’d been feeling. “A life you knew but forgot.”

Steve looks up in a flash. “Exactly.”

It’s deathly silent between them in that instant, their confessions lying on the floor like a beating heart beneath the floorboards, thump-thump-thumping the weight of their secrets in morse code. 

“What does this mean?” One of them says, quiet in the silent night. 

“I don’t know,” the other replies, a hopeless answer in a hopeless world; but a prayer, nonetheless.

 

                                                                                                                                ~*~

 

Steve doesn’t sleep anymore, he only dreams. 

He closes his eyes, and 

 

                                        Falls.

 

There’s a noticeable pause in reality, and everything around him becomes malleable, like he’s pushing at the edge of the universe. And then, like glass, it all shatters, and dissipates away, until he’s left with a cavernous, hungry dark that eats him up with fragments, shards of memories and lives he’s lived. A hand,  

 

                                                                 A touch 

                                                                                          Reaching-- 

 

He jolts awake, catapulting himself upright from his bed, gulping in breath after desperate breath. 

Then, reliably, Bucky’s voice, in the dark. “You okay?”

“Bad dreams, s’all,” Steve will reply, voice still shaky. 

His palm won’t stop itching.

 

                                                                                                                                      ~*~

 

The next morning, both exhausted and jittery from too much coffee and smokes, they walk to breakfast together through the trenches. 

They stop in their tracks at the commotion around them, men gathered in unformed droves looking at something-- No, some _ one.  _

“Well I’ll be damned,” O’Malley, a private who couldn’t tell his ass from a hat, exclaims. “Don't tell me it's Larsen?” He steps closer to the man, slightly obscured from Steve’s view, but tall, and thin. “It is you, damn! You must be the oldest man in this army. I’ve only heard of you, and your skills.” He lets out a horrific, braying laugh. “My grandaddy fought in your regiment in the great war. He said you were some kinda psychic. Go on, do it! What am I thinking of right now?”

“Impending war?” Larsen answers, dry. “You don’t have to be a psychic to know that.”

The brief quorum dispersed then, hollering and laughing and the exchange already leaving their minds. Larsen stays where he is, though, back pressed up against the mudbank.

Steve knows him, or at least, recognises him. He’s the man who welcomed him, he’s the man who smokes. 

“He’s a corporate,” someone says in front of them. “He’ll be easy to follow.”

“Seems to have his head screwed on right,” another snorts. 

“My uncle Joe fought with him too,” Wide-eyed Parker says. “He’s like a legend. Nobody knew anything of his background, other than he was a veteran of the Balkan War before immigrating. But when it was all over, everyone knew who he was.”

“And who was that?” Bucky’s voice asking. His cheeks look hollow in this light, his eyes gaunt. As if he’s been stretched and pulled with violence and stress.

“Johan, the lighthouse keeper.”

A lighthouse keeper; it was fitting, Steve supposed. A light in the dark, a guardian angel. 

Larsen looks over at him, cigarette in his mouth, and smiles. 

 

                                                                                                                                  ~*~

 

“108th division of the 9th brigade, 1st company, welcome to war time, boys,” Ambrose booms. “Now I can’t promise much action out there in the great beyond, but I can promise you’re gonna get wet, and you’re gonna be cold, and it’s gonna be miserable. I can also promise you it will be a helluva lot worse if we let those Nazis win. This is the price we pay, boys. You have the hopes and dreams of millions of good, American people on your shoulders. You’re not doing this for me, or for Mr. President. You’re doing this for your mom, your dad, your sister. You’re doing this in the hopes that ten years from now when you settle down your children won’t be speaking German. Now, stand at attention!”

There’s a shift as they all stand straighter, fighting against the downpour, gun straps digging into the meat of their shoulders. There’s an attack looming, or so intelligence tells them, and so Ambrose vows to get there before the entire base becomes Nazi fodder. 

They’re getting into formation, just about, when Bucky grabs Steve’s arm.

“Let’s take the back,” he says. “We’ll be better use to them if we can draw out this attack as long as possible.”

Steve hesitates, and for a terrible, awful second, Bucky thinks he’s going to argue with him. Instead, he stops himself, and says “Good plan”, and Bucky thanks his lucky stars.

This is where they stand to die, in pouring rain, as the ground beneath them slowly turns to swamp. The rain beats down against them relentlessly, and Bucky has to blink twice a second just to keep his eyes clear. They trudge through mud and guts as they slowly turn to rain themselves. Invisible rifles and machine guns hammered from what seemed to be every corner of the globe. 

Crawling through the infernal racketing of bullets floating loose in the air, Bucky dodged shot after shot like it was muscle memory. It felt like that, like he knew exactly what was coming before it ever came, and that he knew what target to hit before it even came into his focus. From somewhere, Steve shouts in his ear to set up shop at a lefthand grassy ridge. 

Bucky yells at him that he’s got his six covered, except that once he’s said it he can’t quite remember if he really did or if it was a memory. And when Steve turns to nod at him, in his mind's eye he can see that same movement, one two three countless times, a constant loop. 

He shifts his weight, goes to turn and-

Stops. 

Takes a minute amidst the death and gore and action to look, closely at the ground beneath him. 

His heart is beating loudly in his chest, ricocheting off his ribs like the echo of gunfire. Sweat and rain are blurring his vision and turning the grass to sludge and he can’t tell what’s stopped him, exactly. Then, like a god-struck rod of lightning had moved it, the land shifts, ever so slightly, and Bucky sees it.

“ _MINES_ ,” he yells at the top of his lungs. " _THEY’VE GOT LANDMINES_.”

He falls back, nearly tripping over his own feet from the terror of having brushed death so intimately. Stumbling, he’s caught by a pair of hands on his back. He whips around and is greeted by the eyes of--

Larsen. Johan, the lighthouse keeper. 

He nods at Bucky, steady and reassuring, squeezing his shoulder. 

 

                                                                                                                           ~*~

 

“I- I- I-”

He’s white as a sheet, hands shaking. 

“Bucky, what? What is it?”

“I- There was a landmine, Steve. A  _ landmine.  _ And I knew it, before I even saw it. And then when I did see it, I saw myself getting blown to bits and, and you were there-- Steve, I don’t think this is a weird dream we’re having. I think we were alive together, before. I don’t think we’re here by accident, Steve, I think we can change things.”

“Change things?” Steve breaths, almost giddy with the relief of a confirmed unknown; that they were linked in some Godly, other-wordly way that they don’t yet understand but yet irrevocably know. “Like…”

“Like live,” Bucky confirms, allowing himself the smallest ghost of a small. “Steve, we could live.” 

“This sounds crazy, you know.”

To anybody else, sure. But Bucky has felt this, like electricity in his bones, and he knows this is no hunch. This is something real and raw and demanding resolution. Before he can talk himself out of it, or back down and say he was only being paranoid, Steve bites his lips like he does when he’s finding the courage to say something. “I think I know a guy,” he says. “I think I know a guy who might have an answer.”

                                                                                                                        ~*~  
  


The mess hall is lit with flickering candles and the canopies above them threaten to collapse underneath the weight of the rain that pummels it from the sky. 

The lone man that sits at an abandoned table is lit only by a nearly distinguished candle flame. His eyes are heavy with all he’s seen, his hands shake when they light his cigarette. When Steve and Bucky approach him, he looks at them as if he’s been waiting for them and they’re late.

“Is it true?” Bucky asks, hesitant. “What they say?”

“Men say many things,” Larsen responds loftily.

“That you’re a… A psychic.”

“Of sorts.” Larsen blows out a puff of smoke. He passes them a cigarette. “Tell me what it is you know, so far.” 

Bucky accepts, gratefully, and lights up. He takes a puff, enjoying the smoke filling his lungs, the way it burns his throat and his nose. He passes it to Steve. “It’s nothing concrete,” Steve says around the cigarette. “It’s like flashes, right?” Bucky nods his head in confirmation. “Fragments of a life and situations we’ve been in before.”

“And knowing things, without explanation,” Bucky adds. “Like how we take our coffee, or--”

“Or where a landmine might be.” Larsen looks at him. His eyes are almost as blue, and bright, and in the dim light they hold an intense and prophetic power. The sheer strength of it, the resolute knowledge and understanding in his words; it knocks Bucky back, takes the breath from his lungs. “I’ve been waiting for you. Took you long enough.”

“So you know? You know what this?”

“Unfortunately,” Larsen replies with a disgruntled sigh, stubbing out the butt of his smoke. “Welcome to the loop, boys.”

Bucky had, admittedly, expected some kind of explosive moment of clarity, like a match swept to flame. Instead, he’s just as confused as ever. 

“The loop?” He asks.

“A loop, a time warp, a wormhole. Whatever you want, it’s the same thing.”

“Yeah but-- but what does that  _ mean?”  _ Steve says, frustrated.

“Means you’re gonna be stuck here until you make it right.”

“Stuck here? Stuck here how?”

“Like you are now,” Larsen says, gesturing to them with his newly lit cigarette.  “Living in whatever slice of life you’re given. How long do you get? A week? A month?”

“Last time it was, I don’t know, two weeks?”

Larsen lets out a low whistle. “Lucky s-o-b. Some of us fucker’s only get two days before we’re blowing our brains out.”

“It gets longer each time though. This time we made it past the battle that killed us before. That’s how Bucky knew there would be mines.”

A ghost of smile animates Larsen’s chapped lips. “Ah. Means you’re getting closer.”

“Closer to what?” Bucky asks, desperately frustrated with how much more confused he is now than he’d been beforehand.

“To the right decision.”

Bucky rubbed his eye with the heel of his hand, letting out a tired puff of breath from his exhausted lungs. At least before, it had been easy. It was Steve and Bucky, somehow forever entwined. That was fine, that made some semblance of sense to him. But now to bring in ideals of right and wrong, and the butterfly effect of his every move made him feel even more helpless than before, like a mouse stuck in a cage.

Steve speaks next, asking the question Bucky is dreading the answer to. “How will we know what’s right?”

This time, Larsen’s eyes just hold a deep sadness to them. “You’ll know, when it comes.”

  
  


                                                                                                                            ~*~

  
  


They lie, silent in the darkness, for a long while, as the camp settles down around them. And then when the last man drops off into a snore, they lie even longer still. The air between them is thick with feigned sleep. Finally, Bucky moved. Rolling over, he said “Well?”

“Well what?”

“Well, what about it?”

“What about what?”

“Dammit, Steve!” Bucky grabs Steve’s face and kisses him. “That, huh? What about that?”

They both breathe raggedly for a second, and it takes a moment for the reality of their actions to catch up, and when it does the blood drains from Bucky’s face as he goes white as a sheet. “Shit, sorry. I thought-- It doesn’t matter. It doesn’t mean anything.”

“Yes it does,” Steve says. “It means everything.” 

Steve is a wound born of a wound, Catholic guilt festering in his being until sometimes it threatens to eat him whole. But Steve looks at Bucky, features sharpened in the monochrome dark, and the way his blue eyes remind him a little more of a sunny sky instead of a storm tells him what he ought to know.

It can’t be a sin if it’s inevitable.

Steve is a wound born of a wound. 

When he presses his lips against Bucky’s, it feels only like salvation. 

  
  


                                                                                                                            ~*~

 

Bucky wakes him early the next morning, before anybody else is awake and the camp is settled into a quiet hush. 

“Steve,” he whispers, brushing the hair out of the other man’s face, his hand an impossibly gentle and comforting force. “Stevie, c’mon. We gotta go.”

“Go where?” The words are mumbled and almost unintelligible against the rock hard pillow Steve has his face smashed into. 

“C’mon, baby, I got somewhere to show you.”

‘Somewhere’ turns out to be an old, ruined church in the abandoned countryside, about forty miles south from base camp. Heavy, dust filled beams of light shone through long. Vertical, stained glass windows and the rafters housed nests of birds. Green vines and wild grass sprung through cracks in the stone, making the whole place feel impossibly alive. If he stood still enough, Steve could almost feel like he was breathing in time with the place.

It feels, distantly, like he was meeting God here. 

Against his wishes, Steve opens his mouth to voice his more reasonable queries. “Buck, if we don’t get back soon they’re gonna start wondering about where we are. And we’ve got that ambush today.”

“Fuck the ambush,” Bucky replies, heated. “Steve, you heard Larsen yesterday. We’re trapped here until God or the devil or someone decides to let us out. I figure that one day, one life, just for us, isn’t so bad. It’s the least we deserve.”

“There’s no priest,” Steve points out, craning his head to look up at the high beams, towering above them. “Or officiary.”

“Don’t matter if it’s not legal, ‘cause once it’s in a church that’s all that you need.” 

Steve is silent for a minute. His wound threatens to rip apart at the stitching, to bleed out all over the holy floor beneath them. “Some people would call this sin, Buck.” It’s whispered, but the ruins echo it back tens of times to him. 

Bucky stops, stares. The only time Steve can remember seeing this much pain in his eyes, he was bleeding out beneath Steve’s own hands. “You think our love is unholy?”

Steve shakes his head.  “I think our love is the only God given thing we have.” He steps forward when he sees the tears in Bucky’s eyes, how equally scared and heartbroken he is. Reaching forward, he wipes the tears that fall from Bucky’s eyes. 

“I love you, goddammit,” Bucky says, voice breaking. “And that’s the only thing that’s constant, Steve. In all the time I’ve had with you, that’s the only thing I remember much of. I figure if we’re gonna be stuck here, then this won’t matter much. At least this way, for one day I got to be yours and you got to be mine.”

“I was only ever yours,” Steve replies. “You know that.”

“You were only ever mine,” Bucky hums, tracing Steve’s knuckles with the pad of his thumb. “And I was only ever yours.”

“And I have no other.”

“And I have no other.”

That’s all they have, in way of vows. They kneel before the rubble of the altar, and light two candles Bucky stole from base camp. They say an our father, and a decade of the rosary, and pledge themselves to each other, forever and ever, amen. They don’t have rings, so they exchange dogtags instead. 

It’s here, kneeling, that Bucky hands him the pills he stole from the med bay. It won’t be bad, baby, he says, just a long sleep. Bucky asks him, again and again, if he’s really truly sure. And Steve is, really. To hold so many lifetimes, it’s a beast of a burden. He wants one ending, that was just for them. Just how they wanted to go. 

“Remember me, okay?”

“I will.”

“Do you promise?”

“I promise.”

This is how they were seen last, desperately in love, embracing in the dark, hoping. 

It was a tragedy meant to repeat itself, woven in the very essence of their existence. A boy pouring love like blood until it washed his body and painted it red. A boy who once encompassed a whole universe inside, a boy that is now a black hole on his own.

* * *

 

 

Steve trudges through the camp, eyes downcast. He tunes out Ambrose’s spiel, remembering it from the past two times he was here. Cold mud seeps through his boots, and sky above bears heavy, black clouds, threatening a downpour at any moment. It’s a harsh rebirth into the cruel cage they’ve been trapped in. 

“Well,” he faintly hears Ambrose say, “Here we are. Fellas, this here is Captain Rogers...”

Through the masses, Steve sees him. He’d know him anywhere, he’d know him blind. Pain-haunted and fear-punctured eyes stare out at him, that sharp jaw, the same messy hair. 

When he sees Bucky, standing there, he almost falls to his knees in relief; that he’s here, still alive, perfectly untouched and unharmed. 

He looks at him, really looks at him, and for the first time, Bucky in his entirety begins to return to Steve. He looks at him and it’s all he can do not to crumple under the weight of it all. Bucky, here, alive, and it’s--

 

                                                   it’s like they’re eight years old in Brooklyn, lying on their                                                    

                                                   bellies and waiting for a story,

 

                                                   And twelve years old dangling their feet in the docks, 

 

                                                   And sixteen years old sneaking into mass after sleeping          

                                                   in,

 

                                                  And eighteen dancing late into the night 

 

A lifetime they’d had together, stolen from them. 

Bucky sees him too, remembering as well judging by the stricken look on his face. Pushing onlookers out of the way he stumbles forward, throwing himself at Steve like a boat against a shore. Steve grips him tight, cradling his head and burying his face into dip where Bucky’s shoulder meets his neck. 

“I remember,” Bucky gasps against Steve’s collar, his fist curling around a handful of his jacket. “I remember, Steve. All of it.”

“You two know each other?” A man, another soldier, asks innocently at this overt display of emotional intimacy not often seen during wartime. Steve scans the crowd that surrounds them, all looking confused, except for one. Larsen, over in a far corner, smoking away. He grins at Steve, and lets out a puff of smoke.

Bucky pulls back, disentangling himself. “Yeah, we know each other from home.” His mouth opens, to say something else, but then he stops, frowning at Steve. “You used to be smaller.”

 

                                                                                                                     ~*~

 

They make it through. They survive the night watch, they survive the raids. 

Bucky miraculously knows where landmines are, and blushes when awed soldiers ask him if it’s some kind of sixth sense, if he’s really going to get the purple heart like Ambrose said so. He brushes it off. “I’m the instrument,” he tells them, “Not the hand.”

 

                                                                                                                   ~*~

 

“So,” Larsen says, lighting a match. “You remember me this time.”

Steve drains the last of his coffee. It’s just the two of them, sitting opposite sides of the small wooden table the Ambrose keeps in the Captain’s quarters. “I remember everything. I remember the life Bucky and I had, before this war. I remember other loops we’ve been through.”

“You love him,” Larsen says. It’s not a question. 

Steve runs his hand along the fine edge of the mug. “So much that it hurts me, sometimes.” He sighs, rubbing his forehead. “Sometimes, I-- I wish that he was hard to love. Ugly, or spoiled, or stupid. Then everything would be so easy. Then it would be difficult, to love him. But it’s not difficult, not difficult at all. It’s the easiest thing I’ve ever done.”

Larsen smiles at him, a sad glint in his eyes. “Ah, the realisation of the universal truth that hearts bleed in both love and war.”

Steve looks up at him. They’re quiet, for a minute. Outside, men are getting ready, cleaning guns and drawing maps and the like. Bucky is double checking the route to get to a train they’re ambushing this evening. 

“Something like that,” he answers.

 

                                                                                                                    ~*~

 

In front of them is a great, sweeping ravine. Bright white snow covers every inch of it, interrupted only by the train tracks on the far right side. It looks untouched, unfinished, like an empty piece of canvas God never got around to filling in. 

“Remember when I made you ride the Cyclone on Coney Island?”

Steve does, and he grins. “Yeah, and I threw up.”

“This isn't pay back, is it?” Bucky asks warily. 

“Now why would I do that?” Steve snipes back sardonically. 

Interrupting them is the sound of wheels on metal, a train fast approaching. 

Morita, through his binoculars, lets out a string of expletives. “You were right, Zola’s on the train.”   
  
Steve frowns. “Wherever he's going, they must need him bad.”

“You’d want to get going,” Jones says, “because they're moving like the devil, and you’ve only got about a ten second window. You miss that window, and you're bugs on a windshield.”

“You ready?” Steve asks. 

“‘Course I am,” Bucky replies instantly. “Punk.”

“Jerk.”

It’s false bravado, but it does the trick, and momentarily distracts them from the weight in their chests, the fear that this might finally be the end of the line.

 

                                                                                                                           ~*~

 

“ _ BUCKY!”  _ Steve screams. “Hold on!”

“Steve!” The wind is rapturous, a loud roar that drowns out everything around them.

“Bucky--”

It’s too late. His hand slips from Steve’s so easily you’d hardly notice it. The scream that erupts from Bucky, and follows him down the ravine is earth-shattering and heart-breaking. 

He stares, at the now empty space below him. 

It was always going to be an easy decision to make. 

 

                                                                                                                         ~*~

 

The snow breaks his fall-- almost. He hits the ground with a sickening thud, and he knows for a fact that if it hadn’t been for the shield on his back or the serum in his veins he’d be dead on impact. 

“You fuckin’ better be a ghost.”

He looks around, still too sore to move. “Bucky?”

“You fuckin’ better be a heavenly fuckin’ vision Steven Grant Rogers or I swear to God I’m gonna kill you.” 

Mustering up enough strength to roll over, he does so, before being racked with violent nausea. Face half in the snow, he coughs and splutters blood, stark red in the pure white snow. “Bucky,” he croaks. 

He’s lying by the river bank, limbs sprawled everywhere, a steadily growing pool of blood stemming from beneath him. Steve drags himself over by his arms, his legs screaming in pain. 

“Bucky, baby, you’re okay,” he breathes. Slowly, carefully, he reaches out and holds the back of Bucky’s head, desperately trying to stop the bleeding coming from a deep cut at the base of his skull. 

“I- I can’t feel my arm,” Bucky babbles. “Steve, I can’t feel my left arm.”

Braving a glance, Steve has to do his best to keep his face neutral. Dislocated, bloody, and broken, it’s hard to find anything resembling human anatomy in the wreck that it’s become. “It’s fine,” he lies. “Just a bad knock. We’ll get it fixed once we’re back at base camp.”

“I’m not making it back to base camp. You knew this was going to happen,” Bucky accuses, tears choking his words as he stares at Steve with those timeless eyes. “You knew, and you should have let me—"

“It was worth it, Buck,” Steve smiles, blood staining his teeth. “Don’t you get that you now?”

“Aw shit, Stevie,” Bucky sobs, tears marking clear lines down his red-brushed cheeks. “Don’t you see what you’ve done? You’ve got yourself killed, you idiot. Stevie, don’t you get it? After all this time? You gotta let me fall. Steve- you’ve got to let me go.”

“Don’t say that Bucky, please don’t say that. We’ll fix it later, okay? It’ll be better later. Just be with me now, okay?”

That’s where they stayed, until the ice froze them over and stopped their hearts, embracing one another, hopelessly devoted.

 

* * *

 

 

It goes like this; they know each other in death, until the end of the line.

 

                                                                                                                                    ~*~

 

“I think this might be the last time we see other, Steve,” Larsen says. He’s not smoking, for the first time since Steve ever saw him. Instead, he’s staring at Steve with an almost unbearable intensity in the candlelight.

With his index finger, Steve scratches at the polish on the table. “How can you say for sure?”

“Do you remember when you first came to me, and I told you that eventually, you’d know to make a right decision that would set you free from this?”

“This decision doesn’t feel right, though.”

Larsen regards with him an unbearable pity. “I said it would be right,” he replies, sober. “I never promised it would be easy.”

Steve exhales through his nose. “But at least in this loop I have him, don’t I? I would rather have him like this than not at all. What’s to say we can’t stay here.”

“You could,” the other man admits. “But what kind of existence is that? Steve, what you do now is not just about your fate, or Bucky’s. This goes far beyond either of you, this decides wars that will be ended, lives that will be saved. This is not easy, I know. It might feel wrong, but I promise you. It is  _ right. _ ”

“I love him,” Steve whispers. “I’ve loved him my whole life.”

“In every iteration of your story, this your only truth.”

“I loved him and I let him go.” With his knuckle, he knocks away a tear from the corner of his eye. “I kill him.”

“And that,” Larsen says. “Is not true at all.”

 

                                                                                                                                ~*~

 

The end whistled through the treetops, a low and mournful hum. 

A river winding through the valley, the shores veiled and blurred in fog, receiving long shadows cast from the white cliffs.

Steve doesn’t like this— how Bucky lives like twenty-seven is the youngest he’ll ever be and the oldest he ever wants to get. But, Steve supposes, in a way it’s true.  _ All you can think of is the finish line _ , Steve wants to say, wants to cry,  _ the burning, the crashing, the end that’s coming for us, when all you have to do is just slow down. When all you have to do is turn around.  _

Steve looks at Bucky, standing across from him, framed by the sky-high trees. “Buck,” he whispers, soft.

“I just--” Bucky sucks in a shaky breath, and when he lets it out he dissolves into tears. 

It’s too much, to see him this way. To have to watch them be torn and torn apart by time again and again.

Steve reaches out, and can’t bring himself to touch Bucky’s shaking, heaving shoulders. 

“I know you would stay, if you could,” he whispers. 

Suddenly, Bucky propels himself into Steve’s chest, burying his face in the crook of Steve’s neck, sobbing. 

“I don’t want to go, Stevie” he whispers.

“I know,” Steve replies. “I know.”

This is where they say their goodbyes, quietly, surrounded by warfare on either side and below them, a grave.

 

                                                                                                                              ~*~

 

“ _ BUCKY!’  _ Steve grips, tighter and tighter onto Bucky’s hand as the wind threatens to take him. 

“Steve!” Bucky screams.

__

_                                         Remember me.  _

_                                         I will.  _

                                                               

                                                                     And he lets him

  
  
  
  
  


Go.  
  
  
  



End file.
